I didn’t know I had connivance. I’ll have to get those inserts for my shoes, which I think takes care of that.
Axel was a great passenger. He loved the entire ride and he pointed out all sorts of interesting nature events and talked about the recently published study about the effectiveness of prayer. He writes a column for the German equivalent of the Wall Street Journal and that week’s column was about how we really don’t need to keep doing that study; prayer doesn’t work.
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DC3 at KSMO
Axel Meyer, a professor of evolutionary biology from Germany, was in town for a few days. He likes to fly and I had not seen him for a while so, with Colin’s connivance, we hooked up for a morning of flying to Santa Barbara. Axel was due in SB for a seminar so he and I met at the crack of dawn at the UCLA guest house. A breakfast at Bread and Porridge ate up enough time that Colin could get the boys off to school and head down to the airplane to meet us. The DC3 is still parked right near Colin’s plane so Axel and I posed under the engine of this great looking airplane. I would love to land this beast, especially at a short strip like Catalina.
Adam thinks that the plane has been in the shop more than it should, given that it is a new plane. I’ll admit that a few of the times I would like to have taken Nell and the boys on a weekend trip we haven’t been able to go because the plane was having some work done, but here’s a list so far of the time it has spent in the shop: Continue reading
I stopped writing on this blog because it was made crashingly clear to me that not only was it a public forum, but that some people regarded it as non-fiction. I was appalled at first, indignant that a writing exercise could be read as an unbiased view of events. I wrote here to satisfy an inner drive to organise strong feelings and a desire to broaden the mental playground I share with my brother. Continue reading
Traffic
The LA basin is a wonderful place to fly. Losing an engine more than 10 miles from an airport is really hard to do and the low level flying provides striking images. What I like best about it (aside from being in the air) is the radio chatter. The controllers in LA are the best in the country. They routinely handle a mind boggling number of calls from heavy iron but are still happy to provide flight following for two jokers headed to Catalina for lunch. On my last trip out to Catalina – to write a grant on the restaurant deck – there were three small planes being released from flight following over Two Harbors while a steady stream of arriving Long Beach traffic kept the controller busy. A side benefit is that flying here completely removes any fear of the radio you might have. The fourth or fifth time you hear a commercial airline pilot screw up a call you lose the stage fright and start to talk like a pro. It’s amazing to hear how clipped, direct and clear Colin has become in asking for altitudes, weather and traffic. The controllers have no idea how low time we are as we speed to Vegas and back.
Progress
Oh, I wish I were a better student. Here are the things I need to do before I take my Instrument Rating check ride with an FAA examiner, and my progress on them as of March 17 2006.
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N181EB at Ryan Field
I haven’t flown that many planes. In fact, my online logbook says that I’ve only flown nine different types and only three of those are more than four hours. One is less than an hour. But having spent over sixty hours in the DiamondStar DA40, it is everything I want a small plane to be.
It is small enough that when I am in the plane alone it is close to strapping on a pair of wings and being hurled into the sky. It is big enough that Nell, Rudy and Dexter have hummed along over the desert with me, with luggage, for an overnight in Las Vegas.
Before Flight
So Adam and I have carefully planned our flight to Ryan Field, Arizona. We have an oxygen system, plotted flight plan, information about the airport we’re headed to, and information about airports along the way. We have snacks packed, liters and liters of water, and even a bunch of “Brief Relief” units. (Those are little plastic bags with gel at the bottom. The same gel that is in Pampers, which turns liquid into more gel. So you pee in the bag and there’s no sloshing or leaking to worry about. You seal it and put it in a trash bag. Seems to be entirely a male sport.)
I made it into the FAA database! Oh. Maybe that’s not a good thing. Continue reading
Oh dear, Adam has written so much more in the blog than I have. I tend to get caught behind because I have a story I want to tell and I’m bad at telling stories out of order. So I’ve wanted to tell the story of our departure from Paso Robles since the end of November. I have at least half a dozen stories to tell after that, some of them probably shorter and easier to write, but I can’t summon the will power to jump the queue.
To complicate matters, I don’t really understand our new blog platform and host and I am bothered that there are posts missing from the original blog and links that I had put up that I haven’t figured out how to add back. It’s so sad that I have slipped into the role of luddite when I used to just love spending my time learning yet another hosting setup. Now I would rather learn a new airport or a new route across the desert.
(So far flying back and forth to Las Vegas we’ve been heading over Palmdale. I think that the next time we head out we’ll go south and over Big Bear and Twenty-nine Palms. It doesn’t look a lot longer and I think it might be a lot more interesting.)
This is the third, and final, portion to the story of our trip up to Yosemite for Thanksgiving. The first was Thankful for Bernoulli and the second was The Worst Case. Continue reading
Flying Summers Brothers 